


Unearthed

by Missy



Category: Jo's Boys - Louisa May Alcott, Little Men - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: Broken Bones, Chance Meetings, Childhood Friends, Drama, Earthquakes, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Old Friends, San Francisco, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-18
Updated: 2013-09-18
Packaged: 2017-12-26 23:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/971413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nan and Emil have a chance encounter after both separately endure a momentous event in American history.  It's been a long time since they've seen each other, but they both need a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unearthed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nocowardsoul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocowardsoul/gifts).



> Written for NoCowardSoul for "Exchange at Fic Corner"!
> 
> This story is set during the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. Judging from Emil and Nan's ages in Little Men, they would be somewhere in their forties during this event.

It was hard to stitch a gaping bullet wound with shaking hands, but Nan tried her damndest to do it, her fingers wobbling unsteadily against the miniscule heft of the needle like a steel platter full of lemon jelly. It took only a breath and a moment of bracing self-assurance before she dipped her head to the grindstone and carefully stitched the uneven edges of the fleshly gap shut.

She was never usually this nervous during surgery, but her patient was an important son of a semi-important senator, and his death would bring her nothing but trouble. She wiped her sweat with the back of a pale hand and checked the clock. Twenty minutes. She was well within the time she needed to carefully stitch up this man before he succumbs to the sweet release of an ether overdose. “He’ll be fine. Keep an eye on it, change the dressing if you need to.” She pulled her blood-stained surgical bonnet off and headed toward the warm water-filled basin beside the bed. “If he has any pain, give him more, and if he doesn’t wake up in thirty minutes, get me.” 

Her attending nurse was a salty thing who had seen more than her fair share of conflict during the Civil War; ten years the senior of Nan, she knew when to speak up and when to let the doctor instruct her. Now, she eyed the fallen man and shook her head. “Rioting after an earthquake. He’ll be luck if he doesn’t end up in jail.” Her gloves landed in the laundry hamper with a distasteful thud. “If he doesn't bleed out first.”

“It’s our job to save their bodies - not their souls, Nurse Cranston,” said Nan. She bent over the water basin and rinsed her bloody fingers clean, then tamped them dry against a clean white towel. 

She vacated the surgical room, and outside of its confines Nurse Cranston then brought Nan a steaming cup of tea. Then they settled in the triage area outside of the main medical tent on a set of repurposed lawn chairs. Outside of their privatized, anesthetized world, it was a warzone; the end of the world. San Francisco had been crumbling in on itself for days, so long that Nan feared they were in the midst of a fire-and-brimstone armageddon, but lately the city had entered a state of convalescence and eerie peacefulness. Carts still clacked by occasionally with shell-shocked people astride blood-dappled horses, and sometimes a new patient would stagger up the walkway, shouting for assistance. Those incidents were growing more rare as the days trickled by; in two weeks, a month, Nan would be back to her surgical rotation at whatever was left of the big city hospital. When the tent city broke up, the people within it would go to work rebuilding the torn structure of their daily lives.

Nan, strangely, would miss this new routine, but if the suffering of thousands were alleviated she would return.

The array of operations Nan had performed in the little makeshift tent would appall her when she sat to recall them in later days. She had pulled large pieces of wood from bellies and stitched gaping wounds; twice she had delivered children, and one she set a broken leg. The days had set around her in an exhausting confusion, with the scent of smoke polluting her sinuses. 

Nurse Cranston forced her to go home, and in the end Nan took her advice, walking four miles home in the brisk night air. Her apartment building still stood, a heap of stubborn marble that had resisted the shaking of the earth’s crust with stubborn determination. It had once been a house of ill repute but had been repurposed during the gold rush into a ‘gentlewoman’s hotel’ for itinerant teachers, mail order brides and nurses beyond reproach. Inside lay a tub and a book and a warm meal, and she yearned for all three with an animal hunger she’d never before felt.

Nan had been so lost in her own thoughts that the muffled shout didn’t reach her ears for precious minutes. But when it did, she tilted her head in its direction, her feet aligning with a crack in the sidewalk as she turned on heel.

“Hello?” Her voice echoed shrilly all about her, and Nan winced to hear it. Whatever made that sound was of more import - she listened intently, quite intently, until she heard a skittering from underneath the rubble, the scratch of a bird’s wing. 

And a hearty, loudly-spat string of German swear words.

She definitely knew the meaning behind them, and the man who spoke them. Terror pinched her throat for just a moment before she charged toward the pile of rubble leaning outwardly to the sidewalk. “Emil?” Her voice caught in her throat, her feet tripping forward over themselves and nearly out of her sensible high-buttoned shoes as he raced to the scene of disaster. Her fingers plunge into the rocks and broken glass, throwing them aside until the beetle-browed, familiar face of her old playmate popped into view.

Nan didn't know if she should raise an alarm or coo to him in comforting barbs of his Germanic tongue, the one the Professor had taught her when she was bored out of wits in the summer of her twelfth year. She only knew that she needed to get the rubble off of his prone body, needed to carefully and thoroughly examine his flesh to ensure his safety.

“Nan?” His voice cut through her panic like a hot knife. “Nan, is that you?”

“And who else do you think it would be?” her temper flared. It was time to ask more serious questions. “Turn your head,” she encouraged. “Can you move your fingers? Your legs? Your arm? Your chest, is there pain?”

“It’s just my leg,” he hissed out. “The wall caved when I went inside to check on the people on the first floor. The plaster fell across my right one and pinned my arms down." As she worked diligently to reveal his flesh, she noted that he spoke the truth and felt a wave of relief. "Hey Nan - I'm starving. Do you have anything on you?” 

"Do I look like a Harvey Girl to you?" He kept grinning, and she sighed. "No, I don't have anything. They'll feed you at the hospital." She pulled a white handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it to his bleeding lip. He kept smirking at her charmingly, and her own smile quirked to life. “Are you gonna give me a hard time?”

"Maybe." But he didn't sound serious.

“Mother Jo would box your ear. But I’m not Mother Jo.” She pressed the handkerchief to his mouth, hard enough to make him wince. Her free hand had finally discovered his leg - the fracture was very evident, but the bone hadn't broken the skin. He shouted and cursed when she prodded it carefully. “I don't think I need to tell you that your leg's snapped clean in half,” she added flatly. Then she withdrew the handkerchief and stood straighter. “I’ll need to go back to the triage hospital for help.”

He frowned for just a moment. “It’s nice to see you too, Nan.”

She shook her head, tossed away the cloth, and scampered off to find him help.

*** 

Soon they were huddled around a kerosene lamp in the medical tent, Emil’s leg carefully splinted by Nan’s own hand and his belly being methodically filled with whatever she could scrape up from the staff's rations. His wounds were cleaned out and, thanks to the bottle of brandy she’d scavenged from her evening meal, his merriness continued unabated.

“I didn’t even know you were in San Francisco,” she said.

Emil immediately puffed up. “Navy business,” he said proudly. “I’m part of the charge protecting the city.”

She gave him a little grin. “But who’s protecting you?”

He grinned. “A tiny fraulein who hates to play house.”

The rest of the evening was spent in happy, drowsy conversation. Emil showed Nan a tintype of his wife and teenaged sons, and his stunningly handsome daughter. In trade, Nan told him of how her surgical practice improved, and how happy the fresh, sea-balmed air of California made her feel. They parted better friends, each pleased and yet surprised by their meeting.

When Nan wrote Mother Jo about the event later, she emphasized how surprised she was to find herself conversing with Emil – of all people – that in one another they’d found friendship. 

But Mother Jo – who knew them best – only told her daughter that the children of Plumfield were all kindred to each other. Jo’s stewardship had grown them into happy, successful people, and it was the finest achievement the white-haired widow had ever accomplished. Better than literary fame was her legacy, which went on unstintingly in the blood of Nan, of Nat, of Stuffy, of Emil, of Daisy. Time would continue to erase their differences and their hopes would sew the seed wheat of the morrow.

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfiction uses characters from **Little Men and Jo's Boys** , all of whom are the property of the **Estate of Louisa May Alcott**. No money was gained from the writing of this fanfiction and all are used under the strictures of of the Berne Convention.


End file.
